Literally titled “The Beginning of the End,” the show’s final season premiere (technically speaking, anyway—the season will be divided into two parts, released separately) starts out in typical Ozark style, i.e. a shocking cold open. Perhaps you recall how Ozark Season 3 ended, with the Wendy and Marty Byrde’s frenemy Helen Pierce getting her brains blown out right in front of (and all over) them? Well, we start out half a continent and an unspecified amount of time away from all that. Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman) chit-chat about an FBI meeting. Their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), talk about leaving behind laundered money as a surprise for some lucky person in the future to find. They’re all so distracted by basically being happy together, for the first time in god knows how long, that they don’t see an oncoming truck until it’s (almost) too late.
Which, as I sit here thinking about it, is not a bad metaphor for Ozark in general. The Byrdes are constantly bombarded with do-or-die assignments and ultimatums, bearing down on them like a tractor trailer headed into oncoming traffic. In this episode, for example, they are tasked by cartel boss Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) with shutting down the heroin operation of local crime boss Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery) and securing some kind of sweetheart deal with the FBI for Omar himself, who wants to retire from his criminal enterprise a free man. This is how Ozark works: The Byrdes are told to do something under pain of death—in this case either at the hands of Omar himself or his grasping nephew Javi (Alfonso Herrera)—and we watch them figure out how to do it or die trying. No one’s died yet, so they must be doing something right.
Tags: decider, ozark, reviews, TV, TV reviews